A binaural hearing system configuration includes two hearing devices (e.g., hearing aids), one for each ear. Binaural hearing systems often provide users with improved sound quality, perception, and localization compared to monaural hearing device configurations.
It is often desirable for binaural hearing system to wirelessly connect to an external device, such as a mobile computing device or other audio source, to deliver audio content output by the external device to the ears of a user. For example, it is often desirable for binaural hearing systems to wirelessly connect to a user's smartphone via a Bluetooth link so that the binaural hearing system can deliver audio content (e.g., phone calls, music, etc.) output by the smartphone to both ears of the user.
Unfortunately, some conventional wireless protocols prevent an external device from concurrently being wirelessly connected with more than one hearing device at a time. As such, in some binaural hearing system configurations that include first and second hearing devices, the first hearing device may wirelessly connect to an external device, receive audio data output by the external device, and then relay the received data to the second hearing device by way of a binaural communication link between the two hearing devices. Audio data or audio packets are understood as data packets representing audio content. In other binaural hearing system configurations, the second hearing device acts as an “eavesdropper” by listening to the traffic between the first hearing device and the external device without the external device being aware of the second hearing device. In either of these manners, the second hearing device may receive and process the data output by the external device even though the second hearing device is not itself wirelessly connected with the external device. It should be noted that, establishing a Bluetooth communication session requires a pairing step, when two devices are connected for the first time. A pairing information persists in both devices. If at a later point in time the devices establish a further communication session, the pairing step is not necessary, as the information is already available in each of the devices.
Although this configuration may allow both hearing devices to receive audio content output by the external device, the hearing device that is wirelessly connected with the external device consumes a relatively significant amount of current (and hence, power) to maintain a wireless communication link with the external device. To illustrate, in the example above the first hearing device may consume around 100 microamps (uA) in a standby mode (i.e., while the first hearing device waits for the external device to begin outputting data that is to be processed by the first and second hearing devices) to maintain the wireless communication link. Over the course of sixteen hours (a typical amount of time that hearing devices are used by a user each day), this current consumption may be around ten percent of the first hearing device's battery capacity. During a communication session (i.e., while the first hearing device is actively receiving and processing audio content output by the external device), the current consumption by the first hearing device may be significantly higher.